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Convincing People That They Are Helpless Is Dangerous, to All of Us.
The NFL ran a “We may be filthy rich but we’re nice Democrats, not evil Republicans!” ad during one of their Thanksgiving day games. It featured Michael Thomas, an NFL player who is qualified to speak on the complex social problems which face our nation because he is black, an exceptional athlete, and with a prominent beard. In the ad, Mr. Thomas was touring police stations, jails, and other law enforcement facilities while appearing to be nice to white police officers. Even though black police officers are ubiquitous in America, they were conspicuously absent in this commercial, for some reason. Mr. Thomas made the following statement in the ad, which I found fascinating:
“We talked to judges, and community leaders, to offer solutions, to make our system more just, which included advocating for reduced arrests, and policies, that reflected where we are as a society today.”
There’s just so much here. But what really struck me was that he wanted to reduce arrests, so he went to the police department. That would be like trying to reduce car crashes by going to the auto body shop.
Shouldn’t he have addressed such problems a bit further upstream? Shouldn’t he have been talking to families, single mothers, deadbeat dads, churches, and so on? I mean, by the time the police are booking a young man for a crime, isn’t it a little late to say “we need fewer arrests”?
So why did he go to the police department?
Partially because it’s easy, I suppose. What are the police going to say to a filthy rich young black man with a camera crew? “Scram. We’ve got work to do.” No, they’ll act interested and nice, and get back to protecting American citizens as soon as he leaves. Why not? He wants a photo op, so they give him a photo op. No big deal.
But the other problem would be that if Mr. Thomas were to acknowledge that the police department is better suited to prosecuting crime rather than preventing it, he would be forced to acknowledge the unspeakable truth: That the only people who can reduce crime, and thereby reduce arrests, are criminals. If they stop committing crimes, they will stop getting arrested.
But that would suggest that young black men are capable of making decisions on their own. And that those decisions play a role in how their life turns out. That would suggest that young black men are not helpless victims, and that they have some control over their own lives.
Democrats believe that that Inconvenient Truth must remain concealed. For a lot of reasons.
When Joe Biden said, “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black” he was being honest. The idea that a black person could engage in independent thought is blasphemy to a Democrat.
And Democrats say that Republicans are racist!
Blacks should vote 99% for Democrats. If they want to go to college, they should hope that an affirmative action program lets them in. Getting into college through hard work and delayed gratification are microaggressions of the white patriarchy. Blacks get arrested not because they commit crimes, but because they are black. Their behavior, and their choices, are irrelevant.
If you wanted someone to become responsible for themselves, you would not tell them that their behavior and their choices are irrelevant. But this is not what Democrats want.
Democrats aggressively promote the idea that black people don’t have a say in how their lives turn out. And they can’t possibly be expected to make good decisions on their own. So then, obviously, blacks are completely dependent on benevolent white people, because blacks are incapable of independent thought. Blacks must be protected because they obviously can’t be expected to take care of themselves.
Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, nearly every Republican in the country, millions of middle and upper-class Blacks, and many others might take a different view. But never mind them.
And Democrats say that Republicans are racist.
One of the many reasons that all big governments fail is that the high taxes, dominant government, and overwhelming regulatory environment convince the citizens that their success in life is determined not by their own behavior and choices, but by government fiat. Such a society can’t last long. When people stop working to improve themselves, that society can only go one direction.
Want another example of that?
The Democrat party started trying to convince black people that they couldn’t succeed without Democrats. That their own behavior was less important than how they voted. They started that in the 1960s or so. And what do we have now? Blacks who vote reliably Democrat. And a black culture that has been nearly utterly destroyed. Prisons full of young, black men. Who were full of promise and potential. Until the Democrat party got a hold of them.
And Democrats say that Republicans are racist.
The Democrat Party should be ashamed of themselves. So should the NFL. So should Michael Thomas.
This is sick.
And now our schools are producing millions of new Democrat voters by convincing them that our society is unjust and that they need the Democrat party to survive. How they vote is more important than hard work, delayed gratification, and improving themselves. Independent thought is discouraged, and they can’t be expected to make sound choices and take responsibility for themselves.
This is what our schools are doing to our youth, across the country.
Golly, I wonder how that will turn out?
Perhaps Michael Thomas could help me answer that question.
Published in General
These schools are run by Democrats. In a city with Democrat leadership. And Democrats continue to be re-elected, overwhelmingly, year after year. Despite the obvious results of their policies.
How is this possible?
The horrible education and the continual re-election of Democrats may be cause and effect.
Thomas Sowell points out in interviews and in his book about charter schools, that the black students in the charter schools do excel.
There are a number of reasons but when I worked in Atlanta (Black majority and solidly Democrat) I noticed that every time incumbent offfice holders (from the mayor on down to the school boards) got into trouble they invariably fell back on the race card and used the ever-popular label of “Uncle Tom” on their opponents. Also, if they became jammed up with Federal authorities, it was inevitable that they would claim that they were being “persecuted”. It always seemed to work.
Of course, there’s a different dynamic going on in cities like Seattle and Portland. Since we have Ricochet members on the West Coast, they have far more to offer on the subject than I do.
Decades from now (assuming that we will still have historians) perhaps someone will be able to provide an explanation for the continued success of the Democratic machines that have presided over the rot (and destruction) of our cities.
Common sense would seem to dictate that people will never vote against their own (or their children’s) self interest. However, as we’ve heard before, common sense is not so “common”. How else to explain that getting an adequate education is “acting white”?
Nope. History interferes with progress.
A combination of fixed elections with the flight of anyone with any sense whatsoever.
Or they’re voting for short-term self interest such as more food stamps, and not realizing or not caring that their children may never be able to get a job.
Listen to Peter Robinson’s interview with Douglas (not Charles) Murray about how horrible he found the Portlands, Seattles, etc of the US. Having watched Virginia turn blue I can see how it happens – the majority of your fellow citizens are voting that way. I’m hoping we can take back part of the legislature and, at some point, get more Republicans back in the executive branch.
I think this is a question that deserves study.
One reason surely is that the Republicans yielded the territory and concentrated on winning the votes of those who’d fled to the suburbs and exurbs. Another is that, when push comes to shove, all “social justice” movements are really about the self-esteem of the middle and upper classes. And political party loyalty is in part aspirational—“the blacks who’ve “made it” vote for Democrats…so we should, too.”
This is why the #BLM thing works—the problem, as BLM frames it, isn’t that poor, mal-educated and drug addicted black Americans might get shot by the police. It’s that a normal, middle-class black American might. That’s why Obama had to claim that if he had a son, he might look like Trayvon…and why Michael Brown’s mother was spruced up for her television appearances. And even Tim Scott talked about being given extra scrutiny by Capitol Police at the entry points to his office building. And it’s why Charles Blow flipped out because his son was stopped by a (black) campus cop en route across the grounds of Yale University. It’s why Bernie Sanders could say, to an obviously middle-class black college student, that if he is stopped by the police he must keep his hands on the wheel or else risk being “shot in the head.”
The “justice” being sought, here, isn’t that the black underclass will be rescued from the mess that—frankly—the Great Society mired them in. The intention of social justice is to share the outrage of a middle class black person who has been mistaken for a member of the underclass.
Suddenly, I am reminded of a moment when my young niece and nephew, natives of Georgia, were visiting here in Maine. A neighbor child had come over to join the fun and, after a few moments of conversation, asked innocently “So, are you hillbillies?”
Even at the ages of 9 and 10, my niece and nephew knew enough to be offended.
Truly outstanding piece. I regret that I can only “like” this post.
Of course they do! What’s so depressing about the present situation is the despair it induces. People start talking about differences in IQ, as if the children attending lousy schools in Baltimore are mentally retarded… and as if black Americans had not managed to produce outstanding schools with outstanding scholarship even in the teeth of genuine systemic racism.
The term hillbilly isn’t as offensive as it used to be after the publishing of Hillbilly Elegy.
Thomas Sowell still deeply underestimates, the growing evidence that there are racial and class differences in I.Q. Though his work on Charter Schools does seem to indicate much more than genetics are at play.
Because the soul man yearns for hatred and the feeling of belonging in a superior group without actually having to demonstrate any superiority. I explained it in this comment. We are born to love our children (especially if they are more attractive and intelligent) and we our born to hate the other tribe.
College kids are the ones whom he lefties are working through. Look at who hates America. Academia has long been the birthplace of bad ideas.
I’m not especially interested in studies of IQ. These do not explain why so few of Baltimore’s high school graduates can do even basic high school math.
I would imagine that, if Thomas Sowell neglects to mention IQ, it is for roughly the same reason: The question isn’t why so few inner-city black children go on to win Nobel prizes in physics. The question is why so few of them graduate from high school with the essential skills necessary for ordinary, meaningful adult life, particularly since Baltimore’s black schools (and Washington, DC’s) once boasted graduates who were not just competent but —yes—brilliant.
Mark Steyn had a bit in one of his books (I’d have to go back and look for it…) in which he compares/contrasts two missives, one from a 19th century British prostitute who was murdered by Jack the Ripper, and the other from an administrator from an American inner-city school.
The British prostitute had not attended any school at all, let alone graduated from high school. Her life was doubtless one of deprivation and material want unimaginable to the average welfare-dependent young woman of today’s Baltimore. I assume you would agree it is unlikely that she was a genius. And yet she managed to write a completely coherent, grammatically correct letter to her father, one that would be introduced as evidence at the inquest following her murder. There is no evidence that the 19th century British court thought it was remarkable that such a person could read and write—presumably, these were skills possessed by many if not most British subjects, even the lowly.
And yet they are skills that are increasingly rare among even “educated” Americans and, more shockingly, among those who would educate the next generation. The other example Mark Steyn provides, the memo from the American public school administrator was… ungrammatical, and incoherent and all-but-incomprehensible.
Not only had that guy graduated from high school, he probably had a masters degree in Education.
Forced to guess, I would assume both the British prostitute and the administrator had average IQs, but even if we could measure these, what would be the point? The problem to be addressed here is not IQ, but the incompetence and mendacity of those who have taken it upon themselves to educate (in particular) black American schoolchildren, and are failing so catastrophically that even the brightest graduate without skills taken for granted in an impoverished, degraded and unschooled 19th century hooker.
Found Steyn’s quote:“…the correspondence of an uneducated domestic servant in and out of workhouses and prostitution is nevertheless written with better expression, better spelling, better punctuation and, indeed, more human feeling than [Otis Mathis ] the president of the School Board in [Detroit] a major American city.”
Sowell wrote a book about about cultural differences and success ( Black rednecks). He talked about seeing the same issues, no matter the race. Single parent households are one problem.
One question: Was the 19th Century British prostitute white?
In The Bell Curve Herrnstein & Murray concluded that small but measurable differences among races could explain and predict some proportionate differences in outcome but otherwise demonstrates that the large existing disparities result from other causes. It would be silly to try to argue the complete collapse of the Baltimore public school system can be attributed to a difference in racial mean IQ scores which are too small to be of any predictive value in evaluating individuals.
Sowell has written extensively about minorities (Jews, Armenians, Chinese etc) with disproportionate success as a result of culturally instilled behaviors. Conversely, deformative cultures have the opposite effect.
The left has seen to it that we are not permitted to name much less address the elements of that deformative culture.
If we want to move beyond the racial stuff (and it seems people always do when I bring this up) Hillbilly Elegy is a good read about how different cultures don’t nurture kids.